Abstract
This article focuses on the status of Austrian German, particularly on Austrian expressions in the globalizing world of the European Union. The Austrian German is a variety of the spoken and written German standard language in Austria.
It differs from the German variety used in the middle and northern parts of Germany in phonetics, morphology, syntax and especially in words and their meaning. Neither the amount of about 4 000 special expressions nor the accent allows a classification as a language of its own.
The first edition of the dictionary Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen contains approximately 12 000 words and items of standard German with nationally or regionally limited distribution, or differences in usage, including their general standard German equivalents. It is the first dictionary of any language which contains the complete inventory of all the nationally or regionally limited standard-language items.
In this overview, I attempted to define dependency between words in lexical (semantic) as well as syntactic terms. Finally, an analysis of a couple of typical serial verb constructions was given in terms of dependency and an iconic word order principle.